Comment on “Self-organized criticality in living systems” by C. Adami

Following extensive numerical experiments, Adami [Phys. Lett. A 203 (1995) 29; Artificial Life 1 (1995) 429] has suggested that the evolution of competing computer programs in artificial life simulations shows signs of being a self-organized critical process. The primary evidence for this claim comes from the distribution of the lifetimes of species in the simulations, which appears to follow a power law. We argue that, for a number of reasons, it is unlikely that the system is in fact at a critical point and suggest an alternative explanation for the power-law lifetime distribution.